Final Graduate Student Reading!

Please join us this Friday at Banter Coffee Shop for our final graduate student reading of the semester.  If what you crave in the libinal pit of your desire-deprived stomach is nothing less than an evening of white-knuckled thrills, swashbuckling adventure, and heart-pounding eroticism, then let me tell you something factual: ALR wants to satisfy you. 

And in addition to our orgasmic casserole of original fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by UNT graduate students, if you show up early then perhaps we'll let you participate in the ALR reading party!  Help us proof the new Spring 2011 issue, in which your name shall thus be inkly inscribed forerevermore, and get a line on that pesky, barren joke of a CV whose desolate blankness you've thus far been so painfully ashamed of!  The American Literary Review wants you to feel good about yourself and your place in this mad, mad world!

ALR proofreading party - 5:30-7:00

Student Reading Series - 7:00

• Andy Briseño - fiction
• Emily Allen - poetry
• Matthew Davis - fiction

See you there!

Happy Thanksgiving! We brought blankets!

This Thanksgiving, I'm thankful* for our production editor Tim Boswell, who seemed very weary in the office today.  Last week, faced with the fact that the ALR reading for that night was going to be all fiction readers due to a scheduling snafu (he makes the schedule so blame him), and knowing that his slot was right in the middle of that reading when the audience's good will and attention spans would both be waning, he did what any true American hero would do: he wrote a choose-your-own-adventure dinner theater piece called The Crying of a Lot of 49 Year Olds.  We all got parts.  We got to do voices.  Some of us realized halfway through that we, specifically, were probably being mocked, but we were having so much fun that we didn't care.  It was pretty great, and I dare each and every one of you to do something half as ridiculous the next time you give a reading.  We all take ourselves far too seriously.


*I am also thankful for a day of reading books and playing fallout without feeling terribly guilty afterwards.  It's exceedingly rare.

Masters of the Typewriter, Doctors of the Whip

Elif Batuman's provocative article, "Get a Real Degree," in September's issue of the London Review of Books has produced even more pencil-gnawing in the MFA blogosphere than usual. Batuman's opening premise, "Even within the seemingly homogeneous sphere of the university English department, a schism has opened up between literary scholarship and creative writing," is one that us weirdos in Creative Writing-English PhD programs might immediately shelve in the "no-duh" section of our mental libraries. We are all too familiar with this schismy schism; with one foot in Creative Writing and another foot in the Literature, we try not to think about a full-blown case of departmental war breaking out where the two intersect.

But Batuman goes on to offer a brilliant critique of Mark McGurl's The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. McGurl's book proposes to interpret the rise of the MFA program "not as an occasion for praise or lamentation but as an established fact in need of historical interpretation." Batuman uses McGurl's dry aims as a springboard for her own deliciously unambivalent inquiry into institutionalization's effect on American fiction. While some of Batuman's critiques of program-fiction are stale (making fun of "show-don't tell" is now as ubiquitous as the slogan itself) her fearless dive into the shark-filled waters of the socio-political-grievance-novel is breathtaking to observe, not least because you are waiting for a team of politically correct white men to swim over and club her over the head with accusations of insensitivity or worse.

To get the full brilliance of Batuman's walk through this minefield, you really need to read the article, but for a taste, consider her take on McGurl's dialectic between Raymond Carver and Joyce Carol Oates, which Batuman uses to launch the question of "Who is the real outcast?" What she's really talking about here is program-fiction's preference for the narrative of the outsider. The problem, for Batuman, is that programs often tell their writing students that one can only be an outsider (and therefore fiction writer) by virtue of one's minority class, race, gender, religion, personal history of war or trauma, etc. According to Batuman, the my-life-is-worse-than-yours-contest between fiction writers is like:

"a hot-dog eating contest between a human and a grizzly bear. Is the real outcast the professor's grieving widow alone in the empty house in the college town, or the paranoid Bosnian graduate student threatened with deportation? Which estranged cousin is the real outcast: the German girl who survived Auschwitz and became a successful but caustic solitary anthropology professor; or the American girl who narrowly avoided being murdered by her own father, then became a good wife and mother, but ended up getting cancer?"

Batuman's argues that the real cause of this preference for outsider-narrative is "shame," specifically, the shame of the profession of writing:

"Literary writing is inherently elitist and impractical. It doesn't directly cure disease, combat injustice...Because writing is suspected to be narcissistic and wasteful, it must be 'disciplined' by the program--as McGurl documents with a 1941 promotional photo of Paul Engle, then director of the Iowa workshop, seated at a desk with a typewriter and a large whip."

At this point in Batuman's article, I was thinking, "Enter nonfiction to the rescue!" Nonfiction doesn't cure cancer either, but it can draw the reader's attention toward cancer in a way that fiction cannot. While novels can offer a heightened reality that nonfiction can't always achieve, at the end of the day, real cancer is, well, real. Indeed, Batuman goes on to mention the "gap in quality between American literary fiction and non-fiction today." (Guess which is of better quality!) But as an example, Batuman points to This American Life--nonfiction, sure, but is a radio/TV program really the only example of great nonfiction she can come up with? Batuman is clearly brilliant and a pleasure to read, but I was disappointed when she dropped her line of inquiry right when she got to nonfiction--an obvious antidote to at least some of the problems she has argued inherent in program-fiction. Hey Batuman! Over here, in the nonfiction section! The nonfiction novel is waving at you! The memoir is jumping up and down, trying to get your attention! The Personal Essay just Facebook-friended you! Over in this section, we don't worry about all this false-ventriloquism of the artificial outsider. We declare who we are at the door! I'll be writing a memoir from the perspective of Jessica Hindman, who is many things, but has never been and will never be a pregnant Vietnamese woman (unlike, say, Robert Olen Butler). If I want to know what a pregnant Vietnamese woman's life is like, I'll go find one and ask her. Then I'll transcribe my notes and begin the same narrative craft process that fiction writers undertake, with slightly different rules.

Some would say that the memoir is facing similar problems in terms of privileging outsider narratives (indeed, during a recent Q&A at UNT, Kathryn Harrison said something along these lines) but I still believe nonfiction allows an escape from the smell of shame emanating off the pages of outsider narratives ventriloquized by insiders (Batuman's looking at you, Dave Eggers!). But as Batuman points out, even Eggers began as an outsider (in his trauma memoir), and his fiction increasingly reads like nonfiction.

So why not just write nonfiction? Given the shame that, as Batuman argues, writers feel about their elitism, isn't it better to state it up front as nonfiction requires (see Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family and Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - both nonfiction masterpieces concerning black life written by white women who don't/can't disguise their whiteness) rather than smuggle it under the skimpy blanket that fiction writers call "creativity" (see James Franco's debut. You know, James Franco - that total outsider who writes about slavery). Isn't it more interesting to know that even the James Francos of the world understand, or at least want to understand, all this outsideryness? Is there any reason we need to fictionalize these narratives? Personally, I think Mary Karr's voice rings truest in the debate over nonfiction's relationship to fiction: "God is in the truth." If made-up stuff can no longer express truth, then why not give the old truthy-truth a go?

But regardless of whether program-writers deal in fiction or nonfiction, my biggest contention with Batuman's examination of shame in the writing-program world is that I believe this shame is somewhat well-justified. Whether you're a student on Planet MFA or Planet PhD - the classrooms of each are, yes, shamefully lacking a representative number of students of color, students from working-class backgrounds, students from rural areas. For this and many other reasons, we Creative Writing PhDs should heed Batuman's article as a call to arms: We know the typewriter, we know the whip - it would be shameful if we didn't write about both.

On doldrums and telling yourself that a fallow period is good for you and not getting super anxious about how if you don't write something great you will die unremembered and alone

Lately, I have felt like one of those inbred dogs that fall to pieces too young, their bad hips a mystery to the children they were brought into the home to please. I loll useless in the corner and make up overwrought metaphors is what I’m saying. I hope I’m not alone in this feeling—I hope it is something universal to the writing life, where so much of who you are and who you want to be are squirreled away into words, the value of which are decided far down the line by strangers who don’t really know your pain and how very very special it is.

I know I must have some modicum of talent, given that sometimes I get a nice email from a stranger who’s read my book, and perhaps once in awhile I get stopped on campus by someone who heard me read somewhere, but I never feel sure of it. How do you get there? How do you arrive at the self-assured charging ahead that seems to be a necessity in this crushing business? These questions press down on me more when I don't have something compelling to write about, which, lately, I don't.  I am always haunted by the words of Flannery O’Connor (that sassy bitch): “Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.” I keep thinking that I will turn some corner or walk into some room and find that all my colleagues and professors are seated around a plate of cookies. Dr. Phil is there, and he tells me I should have a seat, these people want to talk to me about something, about how I’m hurting their lives, about how they have a way that I can get well.

What can I say? I am often a bummer. This post is not meant as a bummer, though. It is meant as a hopeful, timid proclamation of solidarity. I am saying to you, dear reader, dear Imaginary Audience: “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, but I’m doing it.” And you can take that with you as a token that what we do is worth doing, or you can look at this and say, “Well, at least I’m not a walking whiny joke like this dude over here” and get by a little better for it.  Either way, I did my best to help.

Upcoming Events, Wonders

I think somewhere in our talks about blogging there was mention of including local events and happenings. Last night Beard and I went to TEX gallery. I read a story about adulterous priests. One of the readers read prose poems while smearing cake all over herself. It was Kullberg's birthday. Colin Winette was in town. It was awesome.

In light of that, I decided to take up the baton of promoting these other awesome literary events which will soon be happening right here in lil d.

First, Sherman Alexie is reading on Thursday. Plus you can go to an "exclusive" Q&A session with him before the reading. Everyone likes things that are exclusive. I learned that from the movie about the facebook.

Also, there is a really cool series of events called The Narrative Arc that's going to be put on by the New Media department. They are looking for readers for the final event on Friday, November 12th.

Below are all of the details for these events. I hope to see everyone there. Happy fall!

-Hillary

Opportunity to meet writer Sherman Alexie:

We still have spots available at a small pre-lecture discussion this Thursday with writer Sherman Alexie. You must sign up in advance to attend. The event is free.

Details: 5:30 discussion on Thursday, 10/28 in Silver Eagle Suite (must sign up in advance), reading is at 7:30 in same location

This is a wonderful opportunity for creative writers at UNT. If you are interested in attending, send your name and student ID to Professor Foertsch today. http://us.mc654.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=Jacqueline.Foertsch@unt.edu

Asst. Professor in New Media Jenny Vogel is asking for fiction, nonfiction, or poetry students to read for five or ten minutes on Friday November 12 at UNT on the Square. This is an impressive idea to explore the complexities of narrative in multiple forms and a variety of objects.

If you're interested in reading (and adding a useful line on the CV), please email Professor Vogel at jenny.vogel@unt.edu. She's curating the event.


UNT on the Square presents:

THE NARRATIVE ARC

November 1 – November 12
Opening Reception: Tuesday Nov 2, 5-7PM

UNT on the Square, 109 N. Elm St, Denton, TX 76201

Hours: Mon –Wed 9-5; Thurs 9-8, Fri 9-5, Sat 11-3 (closed for lunch from 12-1)

It's a lucky man who can say "when," "before" and "after."
- Robert Musil "Man Without Qualities," 1930

Narratives are based on a sequence of events, no matter how improbable, "as long as it sets off an emotional tick, to which subsequent episode can provide an answering tock." This suggests that narratives not only rely on sequencing or stringing together cause and effect, but also on our perception or misperception of relationships or dependencies within the episodes. How can this understanding of sequences and a continuation of plot through textual strings be translated into images and objects? What kind of structures can replace the words, sentences and paragraphs to experience narration in a visual context?

The moving image, the graphic novel, or digital art might be the most obvious media where both text and image collide, providing a bridge between the two disciplines. But if narratives are also established through our ability to read dependencies between two or more parts, then stories can emerge from spatial relationships, complex layering of material and meaning, or the artistic process itself.

The artists in this exhibition address the questions raised above, while challenging the conventions of visualizing story.

Artists featured in this exhibition:
Patryce Bak, Ofri Cnaani, Ellie Ga, Sven Johne, Ezra Johnson, Selena Kimball, Ellie Krakow, Dave Mishalanie, Joshua Sanchez, Julie West
and UNT New Media Art students.

Events related to the exhibition:

Tuesday, November 2nd, 5-7PM
Opening Reception

Friday, November 5th, 5-9PM-
First Friday Denton Gallery event with live-cinema projections by UNT New Media Art students

Thursday November 11th, 7-9PM
Exhibition artist Ellie Ga will perform The Fortune Tellers, a performative lecture about her experiences on board the Tara, a sailboat drifting in the frozen pack ice in the Arctic Ocean.

Friday November 12th, 5-6:30PM
Reading by UNT Creative Writing students

This Poem Tastes Funny

Recently, I received a package in the mail from a professor at my MFA program. It's a poster advertising a reading to celebrate 25 years of the Tom McGrath Visiting Writers Series. The reader, looking thoughtful with a stem of glasses on his lips, is Billy Collins.

I laughed when I unrolled the poster. I don't like Billy Collins. I mean, I really don't like Billy Collins. I'm sure every poet in my MFA program knew that I was adamantly against Collins' brand of poetry (I know the professor who sent me the poster knew—he was my thesis chair). If they didn't know, they could read about it—the first section of my thesis is partly devoted to critiquing Collins, particularly his use of humor.

Now, I'm not saying that Collins' is “wrong” in his use of humor or anything like that. My argument revolves around the idea that he really doesn't try as hard as he could. Sure, a reader could interpret one of his poems in x amount of ways, but one, I think, doesn't really have to apply themselves too much to “get it.” In my research for my brief discussion of Collins, I came across an interview where he said that “poetry should be transparent” and that “there's an awful lot of bad poetry...about 87 percent of the poetry in America is not worth reading.” One can assume anything that is not transparent, not easy to get on the first read, not difficult to understand, is not worth reading. Well, that's excluding an awful lot.

What Collins' does not talk about, and what seems to get lost in a lot of discussion about “good” and “bad” poetry, is taste. The literary theory class I'm in pokes at my brain and makes me want to ask, “But, does taste really exist?” And yes, it does. It has to exist. If there were no such thing as taste, Collins would love that 87% of poetry he currently dislikes. If there were no taste, I would like Collins' poetry.

But where does taste come from? How do I know what I like and what I don't? Saying, “I like making the familiar unfamiliar,” is true, but, that seems to be Collins' modus operandi too, though there are different results. Can I just say that my gut tells me what I like? Can I say that growing up in “flyover country” makes my imagination work harder? I don't know. These are questions I can't answer.

I don't know how many poems in the world I'd call “awful,” but I don't think 87% is close. I couldn't even count that number of poems. Collins' taste must be narrow in scope though if 87% are not worth reading. 87% of people who buy poetry from chain bookstores, such as Barnes & Noble and Borders, probably buy Collins' books. He has broken sales records for poetry (I know, this is hard to believe, it's poetry after all). Every time I have been to a chain bookstore, I have seen Collins' name staring at me from a handful of book spines. My professor told me over 400 people came to hear Collins' read. Almost every reading I attended while I was a MFA student, there were around 25 people, maximum. Does this mean I have bad taste? Am I missing something here?

I will give Collins credit though—I am happy that poetry is still being read other than by those of us in the Academy or graduate students in English. One of the things that poetry, or literature for that matter should do, is entertain. Many people are entertained by Collins' poems. That's especially telling today, where electronic media dominates the entertainment landscape.

So, I'm going to put the poster up in my cubicle. I'm not sure what my professor told Collins about me, if anything, or if he read my thesis introduction. Collins was nice enough to sign it though, in what appears as a cheerful scribble. This reminds me that I stole a poem idea from Collins and even got the poem published. I hope it's the most awful poem ever written.

The heartbreaking job of the assistant fiction editor

What am I doing?  I'll tell you what I'm doing.  I'm reading stories, whittling down the list of great ones until what's left are the really great ones that will have a shot at being in our latest issue.  And I don't want to be doing this, man.  I want to be in bed, or writing, or reading a book, or something.  I have my postcolonialism class in the morning with Dr. Raja (who, it should be noted, is able to run down a hundred years of Western thought in the space of forty-five minutes while his students sit there, at once aghast and amazed), there's a stack of grading to be done on my desk that has gone rancid from sitting there too long, I haven't been to the gym in a few weeks and am becoming unacceptably fat and sluggish, and--let's face it--Halo isn't going to play itself.  But I'm here, reading stories, making ugly decisions I don't want to make.

I wrote a story last semester about a guy who had my job who started writing odd, personal notes back to the submitters.  The guy in my story is a navel-gazer, one of those sad sacks that young men from Brooklyn tend to write about, and in writing it I was trying to work my way through the way this impersonal yet personal connection between the guy who is in charge of reading his way through the pile and the person who has sent their little measure of hope to him along with a SASE is in many ways a horrible bummer.  My job as arbiter and gatekeeper makes me the enemy.  I am the faceless jerk who says, "No, I don't think so."  And then, I toss it carelessly into the rejection box.  Carelessly!  Now, I am up late reading stories that I genuinely like and trying to decide if I genuinely like them enough, weighing them against the other ones, knowing that my decisions will ultimately be this many blows to this many egos. 

The upside is that I've read some great things so far, and I'm going to continue reading great things.  So many times over the past few weeks, something has come along in a story that has knocked me flat on my ass.  Just now, it happened again.  Every time this happens, I want to call the number on the cover letter, I want to ring someone up at this late hour and say, "Hey, look, I don't care what happens from here on out, but this one sentence, right here on page 4.  Hell, you've done it."

I probably shouldn't do that, though.  We have a reputation.  We are respectable.  I am prone to gush and am not that great at the whole extemporaneous phone conversation thing.  The awkward humanist, in love with everybody.  And of course, what does a phone call like that mean if your story doesn't end up making it through the next round?  What good then is that one sentence, that self-contained gut-punch of a sentence that woke me up and reminded me why I write in the first place?  The person on the other end would be right to feel cheated.

And... that's quite a rant, I guess.  What I mean is that I love my job, in part because I hate my job.  Keep sending me your stories.  I'll try my best to like them hard enough.

"Who is speaking?" Recent Debates about Contemporary Literature

There's been a bit of a furor recently about just who, exactly, is deciding what a work of fiction needs to include in order to be dubbed an "American Masterpiece." First, there was the Huffington Post article that lambasted "The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers."

Interestingly, number 15 is not a writer at all but New York Times Literary critic Michiko Kukatani, who recently gave Johnathan Franzen's new book a rave review, prompted The Atlantic to publish this article, claiming, in so many words, that the NYT neglects female authors and privileges the white, upper-class male writer who lives in Brooklyn (and yes, he is sad).

(The Awl also weighs in, chronicling the response of a few female writers to promote female fiction).

I've taken a particular interest in this latest onslaught of debates on how who is speaking determines who we(the public) are reading because I've also spent the last few days working my way through Ania Loomba's Colonialism/Postcolonialism, and that will get anyone thinking about the politics and power underlying the literary industry in contemporary circles.

On the one hand, certainly not all 15 of the "overrated" authors are white males. Yet this seems to place the "non-white males" on the list in a double bind: they are dismissed both by the NYT and by those who seek to shatter the hold that the NYT and those like them have over what we deem masterpieces of contemporary fiction.

As a sad young literary woman myself, I must confess that I too feel the privileging of the sad young literary men, and not just those who are our contemporaries. This is why Mary Gaitskill is called a "shock" writer and Philip Roth or Charles Bukowski are not, for example.

This is what, I think, makes the Awl article's conclusion particularly sad: if it is, in fact, impossible for someone speaking from the dominant position to speak for someone in the oppressed or subaltern position, then what help is it if the "single story" about non-white, non-sad, non-literary men is immediately dismissed as one that doesn't speak to the collective American reality?

If language speaks us, then limiting our literary output will have an impact on our worldview, and the cycle which privileges certain subjects and perspectives as more "literary" than others will continue. This seems analogous to colonized subjects inability to locate a language or mode of expression in which to speak.

What does everyone else think about this?

Here is one reason it is great to be a creative writer or the kind of person who likes creative writers if you live in Denton

All through the spring and summer, while the UNT English Department reading series wound down, Tex Gallery picked up the slack.  Tex Gallery is an art space that is run by a couple of guys that decided their house would be more fun if people came over to check out readings, jazz and experimental music, and local artists.  They also thought it would be fun to start their own review.  So they made both of those things happen, and now every month or so they set up a showing and invite everybody they know, which includes a lot of the people in the creative writing department here at UNT.

I've read there a few times, as have several of our other graduate students, and every time I've been super jazzed afterward.  Imagine a large living room without any furniture that is packed with people.  It's about ninety degrees, and everybody is sweating and sitting on the floor.  I'm talking unbearably hot and uncomfortable.  But when you get up there to read, things get electric.  They came to see you read.  That's what they're doing there.  It's a pretty great feeling.

The readers are phenomenal, too.  Below are Colin Winnette and Michael Inscoe from last week's set list (full disclosure: my reading will probably be uploaded to the texgallery YouTube account later in the week.  I encourage you not to look at it).











So yeah, that's one reason it's great to live in Denton.  Not only that, there was also the informal summer reading series that our friend Adam put together (Adam, I would probably brag about you if you had a youtube account), and now that the semester's started back up we also have the monthly student reading series again.  In fact, we're having one this Saturday at 7:30 at the Jupiter house on University.  Readers include Chelsea Woodard, Nathan Logan, Tim Boswell, Jessica Hindman, Jaclyn Thies, and Zach VandeZande (that's me).  If you are within driving distance, there are worse things to do with your Saturday.

ALR Summer Book Club: Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

It's somehow fitting to be writing a blog post about Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned on my 29th birthday, because the stories in this book are about the anger and bitterness that come with being a misfit, and no one is a misfit in society like a 29-year-old balding man in a college town. Plus my generation doesn't really have anything definitive about it, anyway. I was thirteen when Reality Bites came out in theaters, and I was twenty-seven when Twilight came out in theaters; what cultural touchstone am I supposed to hang my hat on? The Matrix? The new Star Wars trilogy? The internet in general? No thanks. I grew up in a time where being jaded wasn't edgy or cool anymore, it was just a natural part of being alive, like breathing or bowel movements. That's why everybody my age loves Bill Murray so much. That's why these stories resonate so well with me.  That's why Wells Tower looks like this in most of his pictures:

I talk a lot about the prescience of Don Delillo's White Noise, and I think writers like Tower, Chris Bachelder, Joshua Ferris, and others have grabbed onto what was true about White Noise and carried it out in their fiction (each in different ways, of course). For Wells Tower (god I wish I had a name as cool as Wells Tower), it's about the utter placelessness that modern American culture has given us, both in our familial relationships and our larger role in society.

Take, for example, the opening story, "The Brown Coast." It's a story of a man who is separated from his wife, rebuilding his uncle's house, and filling an aquarium with the things he gets from the sea. I'll spare the details (in part because I read the collection back in April and have a terrible memory), which are rich and telling, but eventually he puts a sea sponge in the tank, which kills everything else in it. The symbolic meaning is clear: this is man's perception of self in the new millennium, a destructive, ugly thing, poisonous by nature, unable to find redemption. This theme runs through a lot of the stories, including "Down Through The Valley," a story of a man driving his daughter and her new stepfather home, "At the Show," an experimental pastiche of what happens when a carnival comes to town, and "Wild America," where a young girl's potentially violent encounter with a young man is supplanted with the embarrassment of being rescued by her dork of a father.

Maybe that paints too bleak of a picture; there's a certain workaday hope running throughout these stories too, particularly in "Executors of Important Energies," "Leopard," "Door in Your Eye," and the hilarious title story, "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned." That hope is always tempered and used as a buffer against the reality of the situation, but it's there, and it's human, and it's meaningful to this reader, at least. "Executors of Important Energies" is a good example. It is a story of a son whose father has no memory, a father who calls the cops on his wife several times a week and chooses to invite a slovenly, overweight chess hustler to a nice dinner with the family he no longer really recognizes. The father says of the main character's stepmother, "I don't know who this woman is, and I don't know why she's in my house with me. But I'll be honest with you. I think I'd like to try and fuck her." This sentence, to me, is as heartbreaking as it is funny, and the story unfolds this way, with the father saying unpleasant things and bringing an unpleasant person to dinner until his wife walks out. The hope– the redemption, really– in this story is so small that you may not even see it, but it's there in the closing lines, as the chess hustler drives them around in his piss-soaked car looking for the wife:

          The impact sent swaying the load of junk and bangles hanging from Dwayne's rearview– Mardi Gras beads, feathered gewgaws, sports medallions– and my father watched the swinging mess with all the fascination of an infant watching the mobile over his crib.  He reached out and caught hold of a miniature New Mexico license plate.  He frowned at the embossed letters reading "Land of Enchantment."

          "What is this?" he asked.

          "It's just some bullshit I picked up on the road," said Dwayne.

          "No, this word here, 'enchantment.' What's that mean, again?"

          "Shit," said Dwayne.  "You know what charm is, Roger?"

          "Of course," my father said.

          "It's like that, like charm."

         My father leaned against me, studying the orange Braille.  "Land of Charm," he said.

Maybe not everyone would find that to be a hopeful ending, but I do.  Yes, it's a confirmation of just how bad off the father is, mentally, but his ability to be moved by something so small and simple becomes uplifting in some understated way.

Tower relishes in good details and well-constructed sentences that reveal a deep understanding of human relationships. Bob Monroe's affair in "The Brown Coast" is discovered because of a footprint on his car windshield that does not match his wife's. In "Retreat," a character would rather eat likely-spoiled meat than admit to being wrong. A sentence I wrote down in my journal, which I stupidly neglected to put a page number with, goes like this: "She would often call just to sigh at me for two hours on the phone, wanting me to applaud her depth of feeling." These are the kinds of things we do, and Tower captures them perfectly.

I've got to give special notice to the title story, which is about middle-aged Vikings who are tired of pillaging. It's a little out of left field, but it fits perfectly with the misfit nature of all of the characters in these stories. The men are ready to settle into an agrarian life, but the newer Vikings won't allow it, and they're excited to keep the tradition of rape and beheading alive while the older Vikings are dragged along to row the ships and grumble.  They talk with modern working-class vernacular and are kind of hilariously put-upon by the whole process; while the leader is pulling a villager's lungs out from behind ("Oh lord, is he doing a blood eagle?"), the main characters look at each other, sigh, and decide to find a nice spot in the sun to relax. 

The story, as with most of the stories in the collection, has a lot to say about the shift of power that occurs generationally and the strange middle ground of early adulthood, which brings me back to my birthday.  I'm 29, well beyond the age of it being acceptable to walk around a party with my own case of beer, but not yet old enough to be excited about a lawnmower purchase.  29 is no-man's-land, and most of the angst of being 29–in life as in these stories–centers around finding ways to make that okay, or finding ways to ignore it.  Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go play videogames for the next six hours.

Recommended follow-ups if you dig Wells Tower: Don Delillo, White Noise; Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End; Justin Taylor, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever; Justin Cronin, Mary and O'Neill

ALR Summer Book Club: Bret Anthony Johnston’s Corpus Christi

Misconceptions underlie many of the stories in Bret Anthony Johnston’s collection Corpus Christi. As Minnie herself tells us: “there was no one time when she missed Richard the most—a misconception of those who’d never lost a spouse…She wasn’t angry at him for dying—a misconception of therapists; she was angry she’d survived”(38). Characters often go through a change wherein they realize that their initial view of themselves, others, and the world around them is out of sync with the reality of their situations. In each of his masterful stories, Johnston gives us a sliding scale of perception and misperception, and seems to always know just when to hit us with the truth. As he says in an interview at the close of the collection: “one of the things I’ve tried to explore…might well be called the myth of memory…If our memories play a large part in defining us, what happens if those memories are wrong or are no longer accessible?”(264). He wrote the book, he says, to imagine what these situations might be like.

We see Johnston’s interest in exploring the way that the world and our interactions with it can define us from the very first story, “Waterwalkers,” where, as in many of these stories, a character struggles to put himself together after some manner of devastating loss: “those mundane encounters left him utterly unsure of his identity. No longer a father, no longer a husband”(12). As Sam hides himself away from the world that can no longer figure out how to define the new him—after the tragic death of a son and the subsequent loss of a wife—we can see the power that lies in the way that our past defines us not only for ourselves, but in the eyes of others as well.

As the Sam searches for meaning in all of what’s happened to him, he draws the predicted routes of hurricanes on a large map. Of course, as his ex-wife Nora points out, he’s wrong about the direction that that hurricane will take, but he’s correct in that hurricanes (or, acts of chance or fate) frame the deciding events of his life (meeting Nora, his son Max dying, finding Nora again). The parallel between the precise nature of hurricane in one aspect (produced by exact combinations of the forces of nature) and the random chaos and destruction that they cause is heartbreaking when applied to Sam’s life. We don’t fault him, or ourselves, for trying to map some meaning onto the forces of chance.

Many of Johnston’s stories contain this element of chance meeting: “Outside the Toy Store” and the mash-up at the end of “Corpus Christi” are other examples. Rarely do the characters get what they expect out of these chance encounters; what at first seems like a hopeful coincidence often serves to make the relationship worse off than it was in the first place (as “Outside the Toy Store” depicts a particularly brutal way).

Equally heartbreaking are the repeated mentions of luck in the first story of the three-story cycle of Minnie and her son, Lee, “I See Something You Don’t See.” Only a few pages in we learn that Minnie’s luck has once again run out, resulting in Lee thinking(incorrectly) that only he knows the truth about his mother’s condition. In keeping the truth from her, Lee sees himself as finally refuting the accusation that he is a man “unable to accept kindness”(48).

But as the story cycle as a whole demonstrates over and over again, there are often vital differences between the way that characters see themselves and the way that others see them. Far from being heavy-handed with this message, however, Johnston draws our attention to this fact lightly with the moment that spawns the title of the story itself, as Minnie recalls the rules of the game I see something you don’t see(52). The premise of this game, of course, is to get the other person to uncover what was always already there. The fresh perspective spurred by requesting, literally, that the other look at the world in a different way seems to be the only thing that can keep at bay the myriad number of misconceptions that keep piling up all around. The visual knowledge that we can gain by looking at the world differently comes to us through a verbal clue. Like the layers of meaning in the stories themselves, it is up to the listener to find their own path to the object in question.

The keystone moment, as Miro would say, for the “myth of memory” occurs in the third story, “Buy for Me the Rain,” when Moira says “‘everything happens to me twice,’” and Lee replies, “things rarely happen to me, even once’”(231). Lee’s description of himself, of course, is not true. We see Lee repeat the actions of his father over and over again, from soothing Minnie in that first emergency room visit, to duplicating the way Richard spoke to her, “she saw him gauging what would be best to say, what would be worst. Richard had done this”(58), to similarities in his appearance and motives “He resembled his father, his thin hair and sloped shoulders and even his reticence as he checked the cupboards” (160). Lee repeats his childhood actions as well “as in his youth, he still cut food with a fork rather than a knife”(142), and we never forget that the two are re-enacting, with a dark difference, their roles as mother and son. Minnie eventually forgets Lee’s name in her dementia, but never who he is: “through that long, excruciating fade, there always remained a silky, durable cord of memory that connected them, a child and his mother”(161).

The conclusion Moira come to in this moment, “‘so we’re a good fit’”(231), about the relationship between her and Lee is as untrue as it’s even been. Unlike his mother, Lee knows that “[Moira] would not grow to need him”(231). As a result, like Sam, everything feels “random and unmoored”(238) in the wake of Minnie’s death. The repeated experience of sneaking off with Moira “relived and vexed him”(242), because he expects that Moira will make his life different, more exciting, but also more uncomfortable, the repetition of an encounter whose meaning he has never understood in the first place. Unlike Minnie, Moira withholds the clues that Lee needs to see her clearer. This, of course, is what draws him to her. In contrast, we have some of Lee’s final actions as his mother has slipped into a coma “he took one of the crazy straws that she liked and returned to the den. He smiled in case she could see”(247). And then the Chekhovian realization, as he lies in bed with Moira, that the events of the funeral and that night are “only the beginning”(252). The worst of his troubles, left without someone from whom to withhold a comforting voice in the night, are yet to come.

There are many other themes worth exploring in this collection. “In the Tall Grass,” “Two Liars,” and “Birds of Paradise” (and, in a way, “Anything That Floats”) all depict coming-of-age stories wherein the young protagonists learn a little more about the adult world than they’d maybe like to. Johnston says “what I find inherently interesting about the parent-child relationship is its fragility and its durability”(265).

There’s also this tantalizing quote, from an interview at the close of the collection. Johnston says, answering a question about the violent weather in Corpus Christi, “…and of course there’s no controlling [the weather]. When these characters find themselves in violent or intimate situations, they’re often stripped down to their essences [….] Violence and intimacy, or love, require participants to leave themselves unprotected, to take chances, to gamble with the worst odds for the highest stakes”(264).

But, that’s for someone else to tackle, I’ve bloviated long enough. Looking forward to seeing what everyone has to say, I hope you all enjoyed this collection as much as I did!

-Hillary

ALR Summer Book Club: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning short story collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999) is our highlight this week at the ALR blog. Fans of Lahiri’s first published story collection will also want to read her novel The Namesake (2003) and her most recent publication of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth (2008) to follow her map of questions about self and family. A story is a series of sentences, one after another, but it does not follow that perfect sentences make a perfect story. While the smooth, minimalist sentences of Interpreter of Maladies can feel unemotional, the stories gather a pathos that will certainly move readers. Her exploration of the Indian-American experience, especially the effect of immigration on the different generations, provides a study of human nature that transcends age, gender, and nationality: everyone hopes and everyone grieves. The nine stories in this collection model for writers the truth that there is no more compelling subject than human relationships.

In an interview with The Atlantic, Lahiri says that she likes her prose to be plain. She continues: “Even now in my own work, I just want to get it less—get it plainer. When I rework things I try to get it as simple as I can. … My writing tends not to expand but to contract.” The following quote from the title story “Interpreter of Maladies” can be taken as evidence of her success, though plainness and simplicity by no means exclude elegance or emotion. Mr. Kapasi, a tour guide, fantasizes about having a relationship with Mrs. Das, an Indian-American whose family is taking a tour in his cab, and her request for his address to send him some pictures makes him hopeful:

The paper curled as Mr. Kapasi wrote his address in clear, careful letters. … As his mind raced, Mr. Kapasi experienced a mild and pleasant shock. It was similar to a feeling he used to experience long ago when, after months of translating with the aid of a dictionary, he would finally read a passage from a French novel, or an Italian sonnet, and understand the words, one after another, unencumbered by his own efforts. In those moments Mr. Kapasi used to believe that all was right with the world, that all struggles were rewarded, that all of life’s mistakes made sense in the end. The promise that he would hear from Mrs. Das now filled him with the same belief. (56)

This is as smooth as language can get. Mr. Kapasi’s memory of the act of translation, a thematically significant trope, beautifully parallels his trust that he will hear from Mrs. Das again. At first it seems as simple as saying, “This is like that,” but coupled with the fact that Mr. Kapasi no longer remembers several of the languages he once knew, his naiveté here ought to warn him and does warn us readers that all struggles are not rewarded, and that some things will never make sense. By use of simple words, clear verbs, and little decoration, Lahiri describes the dear self-deception that is the source of much of Mr. Kapasi’s behavior.

My favorite story is “A Temporary Matter,” the first in the arrangement. One of the most perfectly constructed stories I have ever read, it describes the slow disintegration of Shukumar and Shoba’s marriage a few months after the stillborn delivery of their first child. That information is delivered on page three with as much sterility as one would find in a hospital: “When he [Shukumar] returned to Boston it was over. The baby had been born dead.” The story’s title is apparent in the first sentence, when the couple receives a notice that due to winter storms, their electricity will be temporarily turned off for one hour every evening for five days. During the outage, over dinner, Shoba initiates a game in which they each tell the other a secret, from a harmless lie to an unfaithful impulse. But the temporary matter gradually becomes, of course, their marriage, and the two secrets that Shukumar and Shoba tell each other at the end of their game are shocking symbols of their grief.

About the symmetry of the narrative structure of “A Temporary Matter,” Shoba and Shukumar are progressing equally on opposite paths, a perfect X. As she spends more time away from the house at her work or the gym, distancing herself from the painful memories and unfulfilled hopes, Shukumar spends more time at home, sometimes not leaving the house for days. In fact, purposefully to avoid Shoba, he moves his desk into the baby’s room, though he does little work on his dissertation. Another reversal is the shopping and cooking, which Shoba had taken great pleasure in, foresightedly buying and preserving food she thought was in excess of their needs, and which she now leaves to Shukumar, who has discovered for himself the small pleasure she left there in the remains of the carefully labeled rice. Dinnertime in the candlelight has become the one time of day when the couple meet to spend time together, but if things continue as they have begun, the routines Shukumar and Shoba have invented for themselves will cease to intersect.

Lahiri’s characterization of the story’s two principle characters—the others are all peripheral, occurring only in Shukumar’s memory except the Bradfords, themselves a picture of what the husband and wife will never be—is built on a slowly amassed pile of significant details. Shukumar’s first description of Shoba has her just home from the gym with the remains of her makeup darkening her eyes, but on the fifth day he reports, “She hadn’t been to the gym tonight. She wore a suit beneath the raincoat. Her makeup had been retouched recently” (20). This litany of facts assumes significance in light of the last confession Shoba makes at dinner, that she will be moving into an apartment. She is ready to make complete her distance from him, absenting herself completely from the house she treats “as if it were a hotel” (6). At first Shukumar interprets her appearance as a return to normalcy, to their previous intimacy, but after she breaks the news it becomes a sign that Shoba has begun planning for the future again, yet one that does not include him.

The notion of the lights going out is a significant metaphor, one of the few that Lahiri indulges herself in. The act of confession becomes easier for the couple in the dark; on the first night Shukumar moves the impromptu candle holder farther down the table, “making it even more difficult for them to see each other” (11). As they communicate more freely and for the first time in months, Shukumar begins looking forward to the evening, thinking all day about what he will say to his wife upon her return from work. He takes more care with the food and himself, even leaving the house to buy candles to facilitate their nightly game. On the fifth day, however, the electricity has been repaired early, and their truth-telling must occur in the light. After Shoba tells him she is leaving him, Shukumar tells her against her wishes “the one thing in her life that she had wanted to be a surprise” (22), the gender of their child, a boy. After these confessions have been received in silence, Shoba turns off the light, and they sit together at the table, crying. In the darkness they become more enlightened, hiding their wounds from the harsh light of day.

Shoba tells Shukumar, “You didn’t have to tell me why you did it” (18), which could be the words of the author herself. Lahiri practices an eloquent restraint from commenting on the morality, decisions, behaviors, or emotions of her characters. Shukumar is drowning in grief, but Lahiri never once mentions the word. Her sentences, clinically correct, only imply the emotional states of the man and woman who did not become parents; even when they cry, she observes the fact like a reporter. Did you find Lahiri’s narrative style appropriate or comforting? Singly, each of these stories carries the lonely reservation of characters walking over strange and foreign ground, missing communications and suffering grief; but together in a collection, that burden might become commonplace through too much familiar treatment. What did you think about “A Temporary Matter” and about the eight other stories? Did you find them too different or too similar? What was your experience reading Interpreter of Maladies?

If you love Jhumpa Lahiri, visit her website or listen to her read and discuss William Trevor’s story “A Day.” If you want to talk more about Interepreter of Maladies, take a look at the reading group guide from Houghton Mifflin or leave a comment.

ALR Summer Book Club: Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (both the original and final manuscripts)

Although Raymond Carver may compare to the “indie band that has become so popular and influential that it’s no longer cool” (see last week’s post), he still merits two weeks in the American Literary Review Blog spotlight. And why not? This indie band is popular because of talent. Carver did not lip-sync his way into undergraduate textbooks. He knows something about writing—something the rest of us should pay attention to. And so we are. Last week, we looked at Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? This week’s focus is What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (the final book and the manuscript version).

The same kinds of techniques that impressed Zach continue to impress me in this week’s reading. Carver uses minimalism and open-endings to draw in readers. As some of his titles demonstrate, his writing isn’t always the most straight-forward or concise. But it’s accurate and means exactly what Carver wants it to mean (let’s not get into literary theory . . . ). The reader knows exactly what Carver’s talking about and why (until it comes to some of the endings, of course). Carver presents only the necessary facts and does not spend much time describing the woman behind the check-out counter or the green shrub that grows next to the front door. He does nothing of the sort.

Instead, he makes statements such as “in this manner, the issue was decided” (303) from “Popular Mechanics.” This single line tells the reader that a baby dies by landing on a lit stove—a very unpleasant matter that does not require images of burning skin or terrorized screams. The reader can imagine pain and gruesome details well-enough without additional help. Everyone experiences pain, and everyone has the ability to cause pain or to make a mistake. These pains and mistakes become the topic for much of Carver’s writings. He chooses to hone in on the pivotal moments in peoples’ lives—the moments that start a new course. And, most of the time, these changes are not seen as positive from the characters’ points-of-view.

For instance, the story “Gazebo” centers on a husband’s affair that leads to the disintegration of his marriage. The narrator says that he and his wife “fouled” their lives and “were getting ready for a shake-up” (238) even though the husband claims to be the only person in error (along with the maid). The husband cheats, and the two begin to disregard all of their responsibilities and try to make the affair right or disappear. But this is not possible. The man’s actions begin an unstoppable course.

In “Sacks,” a father speaks to his son about how he goes for such a long time without “breaking any rules,” but suddenly cheats on his wife. Even he can’t explain the cause. In neither of these (and in most of) Carver’s stories, the narrators regret the “bad” decisions made. Carver does not celebrate these “rebellious” actions, but shows how all people are capable of acting out of character and that—sometimes—the consequences of said-mistakes change everything in a life. Carver defines those unavoidable human moments of life. Not all pain comes from mistakes, though, and shows up whether we “deserve” it or not. Topics of Carver’s stories also include childhood cancer, growing apart, and old age.

No matter the topic, though, Carver only includes details that matter (as stated earlier). Just as with Tobias Wolff, Carver’s stories challenge me to include only pertinent details (a kind of tricky thing to do). As Mr. Vande Zande pointed out last week, all of Carver’s minimalism and partiality to everyday heartbreaks solidify at the end of his stories. In the “Tell the Women We’re Going,” Carver describes the relationship of lifelong friends (Bill and Jerry) and the aspects of life they’ve shared (and that’s pretty much everything). But something changes at the end. The two men hit on two girls (their ages aren’t given) and the narrator believes that this is a kind of innocent event (as innocent as adultery can be).

Carver shocks the reader in the very last paragraph of the story: “He never knew what Jerry wanted. But it started and ended with a rock. Jerry used the same rock on both girls, first on the girl called Sharon and then on the one that was supposed to be Bill’s” (264). Bill and Jerry did not share this event and Bill is left trying to figure out how it all happened. And so is the reader. The events are clear, but their meaning is not—just as in real life. Meaning in life—and in stories—cannot be forced.

The open-ended stories that Carver uses to gently lead his reader to meaning tend to be stronger in the final version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love? The final version of the manuscript includes a one more story and a different mix of the others. What strikes me most about the changes Carver made to the stories does involve details given and the endings (one the same in some instances). In “Why Don’t You Dance?,” the final version includes this description of the homeowner:

“The man came down the sidewalk with a sack from the market. He had sandwiches, beer, whiskey. He saw the car in the driveway and the girl on the bed. The saw the television set going and the boy on the couch” (225).

This version includes much less detail about the man than the original:

“Max came down the sidewalk with a sack from the market. He had sanwiches, beer, and whiskey. He had continued to drink through the afternoon and had reached a place where now the drinking seemed to begin to sober him. But there were gaps. He had stopped at the bar next to the market, had listened to a song on the jukebox, and somehow it had gotten dark before he recalled the things in his yard” (753).

Carver deleted much of the detail from the first draft of the story. This gives the reader much more independence to find out who Max is and why the furniture is in the yard. The original description makes Max out to be a desperate lonely man “drinking away his sorrows.” While this is still true in the second version, Carver leaves this information out, adding a bit more mystery to the story for the reader—causing the link between both the girl’s and Max’s desperation to be less apparent.

The original version of “Tell the Women We’re Going” includes much more detail—more unclear detail—than does the final version. Earlier, we looked at the concluding paragraph of the final version of this story. Carver quite bluntly inserts a scene where Jerry undoubtedly injures (or kills) two girls with a rock. The original version, though, is much more unclear:

“But Jerry was standing now in front of him, slung loosely in his clothes as though the bones had gone out of him. Bill felt the awful closeness of their two bodies, less than an arm’s length between. Then the head came down on Bill’s shoulder. He raised his hand, and as if the distance now separating them deserved at least this, he began to pat, to stroke the other while his own tears broke” (844).

To me, there seems to be some pronoun confusion here (maybe on purpose)? I am not sure whose bodies are close together . . . Bill’s and Jerry’s and Jerry’s and the girl’s? I am betting the second, but this is merely a guess. This ending also leaves much room for confusion regarding whom all is dead (both the girls or “just” one?) and who is patting whose head? Sometimes I am a dense reader, but I did not feel confused whenever I read the final draft of the story. Instead, I knew who killed who and the ramifications this cost—or what this signified in—Bill and Jerry’s relationship. Carver toned-down the details in order to clarify his main point so that the reader can connect the dots in the proper way. This is one kind of lesson writer’s should take away from Carver.

For the sake of length, I’ll leave it here. Do make sure to read the Selected Essays section of the collection. The essays shed light on Carver’s background and also his writing process. His essays alone deserve two or three blog spotlights.

ALR Summer Book Club: Raymond Carver's Collected Stories (more specifically, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?)

I have to admit that for a long time I just did not get Raymond Carver. It’s not that I’m unfamiliar with him or anything—I’d read and taught “Cathedral” a dozen times, of course, and I plowed through What We Talk About When We Talk About Love one rough afternoon while having a double whiskey in the tub¹. It’s mostly that I thought he embodied the failings of the modern literary short story, that they are open-ended, obtuse affairs that begin in medias res and end in medias res. Hemingway meets Bukowski with less machismo and less of a desire to make a point. I am not beyond admitting that I am sometimes an idiot. And that’s the case here.

Everyone’s favorite Bulgarian, Miroslav Penkov², compared Raymond Carver to an indie band that has become so popular and influential that it’s no longer cool, and he might be right there. But listen: many of the stories in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please knocked me on my ass. Reading it, I got what Carver was trying to do in a way that I didn’t as an undergrad or even a master’s student.

What it comes down to, in many cases, is tension. The worst thing in the world would be to be in a Raymond Carver story. I’m talking specifically here about “Put Yourself in My Shoes” and “What’s in Alaska?” Both of these stories involve social situations under duress—in “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” a writer and his wife make an unannounced visit to the people living in their old home, and in “What’s in Alaska,” two couples get together to get high³ and eat junk food. In both, what’s marvelous is how the conversation starts fraying at the edges as the story progresses, leaving the reader waiting for something truly awful to happen without quite knowing what it will be or if it’s deserved. In “What’s in Alaska?” that awful thing doesn’t happen, as Carver carefully balances the conversation of four people who are high as hell and both trying and not trying to talk about the fact that there may be an affair going on, but we’re still left with a chilling image, which I’m going to quote here:

Just as he started to turn off the lamp, he thought he saw something in the hall. He kept staring and thought he saw it again, a pair of small eyes. His heart turned. He blinked and kept staring. He leaned over to look for something to throw. He picked up one of his shoes. He sat up straight and held the shoe with both hands. He heard her snoring and set his teeth. He waited. He waited for it to move once more, to make the slightest noise.

This last paragraph has nothing at all to do with the events that came before, but thematically, it’s perfect. It captures the man’s anxiety, the sense that something is wrong and has always been wrong under the surface or just out of view, without giving him any sense of resolution.

I suddenly feel like I need to re-read “Put Yourself in My Shoes” to really get at it, so I’ll just say that it has the same kind of tension as “What’s in Alaska,” only in this case it boils over into an ugly confrontation and a deliciously meta⁴ final line: “He was silent and watched the road. He was at the very end of a story.”

Another thing that Carver does well is capturing that sense that something is wrong without quite letting the reader know what. In a less skilled writer’s hands, this trick would seem like cheating or not being forthright with the reader. “How About This” is a good example of what I’m talking about, but it’s all over this collection. In it, Harry and Emily are returning to Emily’s childhood home to live. It’s a cabin in the woods without electricity or running water, and Emily is afraid that Harry won’t be able to handle it. More than that, she’s concerned about dragging up old memories. The undercurrent is why they’re coming back here at all, and through the course of the story it is revealed that they are largely there because they don’t have the money to be anywhere else. The story ends with her doing cartwheels and handstands (as a child, she’d wanted to be in the circus) while he tries to light a cigarette. Look at these two passages, one close to the end of the story and then the very last passage:

He was pleased he knew himself so well. He would be all right, he decided. He was only thirty-two. Not so old. He was, for the moment, in a spot. He could admit that. After all, he considered, that was life, wasn’t it? He put out the cigaret. In a little while he lit another one.

And then:

He was reaching to light a cigaret with his last match when his hands began to tremble. The match went out, and he stood there holding the empty matchbook and the cigarette, staring at the vast expanse of trees at the end of the bright meadow.


“Harry, we have to love each other,” she said. “We’ll just have to love each other,” she said.

I feel like they speak for themselves; those last lines encapsulate everything that’s wrong with their situation, and what they need to do to make it out. There’s hope, but it’s not a productive, let’s all read The Secret kind of hope—it’s bittersweet, it’s bearing the weight of probable failure, and it’s life-affirming in its honest appraisal. That’s what Carver’s all about⁵.

I’m talking a lot about the way Carver ends stories because that’s where the magic is in his stories. Everything in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please is spring-loaded, and even the stories that don’t have that gut-punch at the end (“Fat,” “They’re Not Your Husband,” “The Collectors,” “Are You a Doctor?”) get wound tighter and tighter in such a way that the lack of release becomes a release in and of itself.

I could go on, but I always feel like talking about stories does them a disservice in a way, especially minimalist stories.  I feel like a tourist at the zoo saying, "Did you see?  Did you see?" as if that adds to the majesty of what the lion has just done.  So I'll leave it at that for now, and we'll see what fruit the comments bear.

For those of you keeping score, next week, Elishia is going to discuss stories from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love as well as their manuscript counterparts from Beginners. On June 23rd, Kelly is going to talk about Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies; on June 30th, Hillary is going to talk about Bret Anthony Johnston’s Corpus Christi; and on July 7th, I’m going to be back to discuss Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. There has been talk of keeping this thing going through the end of July, so if you have a recommendation of an author’s first short story collection that you’d like to see us talk about, well, that’s what the comment section is for (I am personally partial to Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help).

___________

1. For my money, a bath and some whiskey will solve pretty much all the troubles of being alive.
2. At least, here at UNT and in the ALR offices. I am sure there are other wonderful Bulgarians over where the Balkan mountains are proud, where the Danube sparkles, where the sun shines over Thrace and blazes over Pirin.
3. By the way, this story is a master’s class in and of itself in writing characters who are high.
4. I do so love the meta
5. See also the absolutely heartbreaking “Jerry and Molly and Sam” and “The Student’s Wife” for more examples of this.

ALR Summer Book Club: Our Story Begins

Wolff's latest collection features ten new stories, along with twenty-one oldies, and offers readers a quarter century of quality short fiction. His work, though arguably underrepresented in classrooms, remains one of the most unique and engaging examples of contemporary American fiction at its finest. Our Story Begins, like most collections, undoubtedly suffers from weak spots. Taken as a whole, however, Wolff’s stories are absolutely, and often inexplicably, both groundbreaking and transformative. All memorable writers, put simply, must approach the human condition from a perspective worth taking. That is, a perspective that reveals another small piece of the unexplored. Wolff, to be sure, accomplishes this—through technical and philosophical originality—while also giving writers and theorists a case study that demands diligent attention.

So yeah, that’s my two cents as a reviewer. As a writer, I find in Wolff’s fiction much more than this space, or my willingness, will permit me to discuss at length. I’ll confine this post to a few elements of craft and a few elements of criticism that particularly interest me, and hopefully it sets the stage for a more comprehensive conversation.

First, I want to say a few things about Wolff’s beginnings. The first few paragraphs of his stories are usually the most crucial. They provide the details of characterization that allow us to understand and interpret everything that follows. Wolff’s endings often correspond in some way to his beginnings. He often echoes, or makes us remember, something that we may have temporarily put out of our minds. These returns, I think, lend unity to Wolff’s narratives. They also provide the ammunition for the punches he delivers in so many of his stories’ last sentences.

This, on the other hand, is Tobias Funke.

The collection’s leadoff story, “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” provides a good example of this. Mary’s deafness is briefly mentioned in the fifth paragraph, and it nearly disappears until the last sentence when she turns off her hearing aid “so that she would not be distracted again.” This sentence resonates, not only because it illustrates the extent to which Mary’s character has grown, but also because it returns us to that which we may have forgotten. The hearing aid—a simple detail, perhaps an example of Boswell’s “narrative spandrel”—resonates for the story beyond what it might have if Wolff hadn’t deployed it early on. The reason for its resonance, I think, isn’t simply that it returns. Nor is it simply that it gives the protagonist an object upon which to act out her transformation. The crucial point here, I think, is that the object itself undergoes a transformation. No longer is the hearing aid a symbol of weakness; rather, at the end of the story, the hearing aid is a symbol of strength. Mary’s handicap, essentially, becomes her advantage. She embraces her identity, her minority status, effectively enabling herself to stand up to the majority.

The simultaneous transformation—of both an object and a character—offers one way for Wolff to achieve narrative unity and resonance. In other beginnings, Wolff doesn’t rely on a single object. In “Smorgasbord,” for instance, the protagonist introduces the general motif of food long before the prospect of dinner at a buffet arises. He also draws class distinctions between himself and his classmates, and admits his possession of an insatiable appetite, all in the second paragraph. At the end of the story, the loss of his innocence corresponds with his purchase of satiation. Desire, like hunger, can only be satisfied through the possession of the material and monetary wealth that the narrator covets. We know this from page one, but the poignancy of the consequences foreshadowed at the beginning will only hit home in the last paragraph. Essentially, Wolff subtly foreshadows cause to subtly strengthen both cause and effect. The narrator experiences a short term consequence of his subjection to the perverse indoctrination of capitalism when his relationship falls apart; on page 225, though, Wolff also hints at the long term consequences of the narrator's experience: "we recall of our own passions, as if they were no more than a series of sweet frauds we'd fooled ourselves with and then wised up to." Here, the narrator's voice suddenly speaks to us from the distant future, and yet, even this older and "wiser" narrator understands the futility of resisting the army of cultural apparatuses from which he must choose to accept either satisfaction and destruction together, as a package deal, or destruction alone.

Similarly, Wolff might introduce a character’s habit—his tragic flaw, perhaps—in the beginning of a story, which sets up its return and resonance in the end. In the fourth paragraph of “Firelight,” the narrator and his mother exercise the “power of looking” as they shop for unaffordable goods and services. This causes the narrator to worship appearances, and it results in his ultimate unhappiness at the story’s end. To really believe in something rather than its mere appearance, for him, is to “make it vanish.”

Another aspect of Wolff that I admire is his Chekhovian ability to maintain detachment and objectivity without sacrificing feeling or emotion. Wolff’s voice is never cold, nor is it sentimental. A few reasons for this, as far as I can tell: Wolff knows when to dive into a character’s head, and he knows when to stay out; he knows what information to give us, when to give it, and how; and he knows how to withhold commentary and let the action and characters (both major and minor) speak for themselves.

In “Hunters in the Snow” and “The Liar,” Woolf uses narrative detachment in two very different ways to achieve the same effect. Both stories feel distant, and both are deeply invested in their characters, but their degrees and methods of measured detachment are quite different. “Hunters in the Snow” works because Wolff stays out of his characters’ heads for most of the story. He zooms out and watches them slowly destroy each other. To hear their thoughts would be to diminish the effect of their mutual destruction. On the page, a character's thoughts lend them greater self-awareness and greater self-consciousness. If Wolff had brought it to our attention that Tub, Frank, and Kenny were aware of their individual cruelties to one another—or that they were capable of situational circumspection—then we might be more prone to pass judgment on their despicable actions. As it stands, we watch the wintry coldness of each characters' outer tragedy unfold without jumping into the warmth of their inner selves.

“The Liar,” on the other hand, demonstrates Wolff’s unparalleled ability to create perfect first person narrators. This entire story leads us, not to a transformation of the protagonist, but to the revelation of how deeply pathological he is. Rather than a turn, there is a no turning back. Like so many of Wolff’s first person narrators, the genius of the character development in “The Liar” is that the narrator’s acute unreliability is never clear enough to cause readers to give up on him. Wolff gives us just the right amount of information, such that we cannot accuse him of withholding or manipulating. He lets the narrator speak for himself, and it works because, despite his pathological lying, he is ultimately sympathetic toward his mother and utterly self-aware. The simultaneous detachment, drawn from the narrator’s objective, unsentimental recounting of the “facts,” not only makes for a fascinating character, but its juxtaposition with the narrator’s sympathy allows for the sadness of the inner story to shine through without seeming forced, manipulative, or predictable.

“The Other Miller,” my favorite story in the collection, works in a similar way. The point of view is close third person, but it feels like first person. Though some readers may anticipate the ending, this certainly does not diminish the experience of all that leads up to it. Like “The Liar,” this story is a journey into the mind of a character who understands—yet simultaneously rejects—his own situation. The slow, steady reveal of information—Miller’s relationship with his mother—juxtaposed with the action occurring on the surface—Miller’s diabolical plot to escape active duty—provides just the right amount of inner and outer story to make the ultimate revelation of the totality of Miller’s shock a powerful one. Wolff brilliantly stays out of Miller’s head unless it’s to tell us how nervous he is about getting caught impersonating himself. He also creates a convincing story by giving the two minor characters agendas of their own—they aren’t simply set pieces or devices. They drive the story because they are interesting, and their personalities and machinations distract us from the truth of Miller’s mental condition.

I think I’ve gotten long-winded, so I’ll wrap it up. I had hoped to throw some theory in—because there’s much here to be thrown—but alas, I’ll save it. One lagniappe I will add, though, is that Wolff’s stories are all immensely concerned with identity construction. Many of his characters are searching for ways to define themselves by first defining their not-selves. Crisis hits them when they run up against something that they don’t understand. Their first instinct is to fill in the blanks. If a blank clings to its vacancy, however, there arises a confrontation with the unspeakable Other. Besides its potential for theoretical musing, this also provides an interesting template for storytellers: confrontation with Otherness requires that the protagonist explain it away (fundamental misunderstanding) or become it (fundamental self-betrayal). After this choice, the protagonist fights a battle to maintain whatever sense of self in which the choice represents an investment. “Deep Kiss,” for example, follows a character’s perpetual misunderstanding of the other that ultimately results in his inability to define himself. “Desert Breakdown, 1968” follows one character who projects his dreams onto the other and thus causes his own downfall, and another character who accepts Otherness as unspeakable and thus finds the strength for self-preservation. “Next Door” also details two characters’ different approaches to explaining the inexplicable, and the last paragraph hints at the arbitrariness of all such approaches.

Anyway, I’m throwing in the towel now. All in all, amazing collection. I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as I did, and I’m looking forward to the discussion!

Hubbs out.